Famous Five tops poll

Enid Blyton, who was called "the 20th century Mother Goose", still reigns supreme this century. Yesterday adults voted her Famous Five series as their favourite books for children.

The series - which started 63 years ago - beat friendly lions, hobbits, wizards and big friendly giants. It narrowly pipped Chronicles of Narnia to win first place despite the boost given to CS Lewis's stories by the current film.

The Famous Five are a group of clean-living, well brought-up middle class children who take pride in being "jolly good sports". Their adventures, fuelled by their inexhaustible addiction to ginger beer, lemonade and sandwiches ("Oh goody, cucumber," said George), were dismissed as hopelessly outdated and irrelevant by librarians and others in the 1970s.

They triumphed in a YouGov poll of 2,688 adults commissioned to launch a drive by the National Literacy Trust, sponsored by Starbucks, to get 50,000 books for schools donated to Starbucks stores this Christmas.

A second Blyton title, The Faraway Tree, came third, followed by Tolkien's The Hobbit and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Blyton also took 16th and 17th place in the top 20 with the Secret Seven adventure series and the Malory Towers girls school series.

YouGov's sample included 759 people aged between 18 and 29 and 708 over-50s, some of whom will have been child readers when the first Five on a Treasure Island was published in 1942.

It introduced the siblings Julian, Dick and Anne and their dog, Timmy. The fifth adventurer is their cousin Georgina, a tomboy who is called George in the stories.

Blyton was once accused of racism, sexism and even homo-eroticism. After an intensive study of the Noddy books, a British academic, David Rudd, said: "There are a lot more bad teddy bears in her books than golliwogs if truth be known," according to a Dutch website on her. Her 700 books came 15th among library borrowers in recent public lending right figures and still sell 8m copies worldwide. She also wrote 7,000 shorter stories.